Kindle Notes & Highlights
Thus Himmler instructed Heydrich to gather a dossier of Gestapo excesses under Diels and Göring as well as a dossier on SA excesses under Röhm and the SA leaders.
The detailed preparations for the strike probably began in February; that is when Himmler started negotiating with Göring for the Gestapo. About this time or early March the SA leadership noticed a decided change in the attitude of the SS leadership: an internal SA report of 22 March noted relations with the ‘entire SS leadership significantly improved’. It added that complaints about SS arrogance were now limited to lower positions.[57] Röhm was conferring normally with Hitler.
As for Himmler, he had proved loyal to his Führer once again. In doing so he not only acted against his first chief, Gregor Strasser, and his early friend and mentor, ‘the good captain Röhm’, but had woven an intricate plot of deception around them first. The man who had superseded him as Police President of Munich, August Schneidhuber, was also liquidated, and Diels would have been had Göring not intervened and warned him;
Plans for the systematic creation of a cultural framework to replace Christianity, referred to as the ‘development of the Germanic heritage’, were worked out between Himmler’s personal staff under Wolff and academics in early 1937. A key draft obviously expressing Himmler’s ideas stated that now ‘in the age of the final showdown with Christianity’ it was one of the missions of the SS to provide the German people with ‘the proper ideological [weltanschaulichen] foundations’ within which to conduct and frame their lives.
would be bringing out schemes some time in the near future, ‘corresponding to the clan beliefs, corresponding to the family beliefs, corresponding to the honouring of ancestors, the honouring of parents and our forefathers’. For everything in life needed to be given a customary form which would take root.
There was the danger of those outside the SS finding the new rites amusing. It was no jesting matter. He showed a similar sensitivity to outside opinion when he turned to birth and marriage ceremonies. These should be private affairs, not held in public, nor even in SS regimental halls or the like, only in the family circle.
It is impossible to say how many of Himmler’s senior officers took his notions as seriously as, for instance, Stroop, how many were prepared to go along with them for the sake of their rank and elite status, or to identify the points where his ambitions did dovetail in precisely with their own ideas of themselves as guardians of the Germanic virtues, members of the master race, future conquerors. All that can be said is that those who labelled him a crank did so after the lost war. At the time he was considered a persuasive speaker.
The brevity and simplicity of the ceremony accorded with Himmler’s distaste for ostentatious display, his belief in the ancient frugalities; the stress on Got expressed his belief in a Creator or first cause. This idea was as fixed as his others and he repeated it frequently in public and private.
Himmler believed everything he said at the moment he said it. If this is the case the imagery of the Jew as a plague bacillus can have led him to only one conclusion. It was a conclusion shared by his leader; probably, like so much else, he took it from his leader.
The other mortal enemies of Germany were, of course, the Church and the freemasons. Here the mediaeval witch trials and the French revolution were called in as historical examples: ‘The French revolution and its reign of terror was purely and simply a revolution of the Order of freemasons, this outstanding Jewish organisation.’ It had resulted in the ‘slaughter of the blond and blue-eyed, the best sons of France’.
This is a key passage in terms of Himmler’s relation to Hitler. He is according him the status which St Paul accorded God. If it is a true reflection of his belief, it shows that he needed to surrender himself totally, and had merely substituted Hitler and the National Socialist Weltanschauung for his youthful faith in Christ and the Catholic religion. It is also a key paragraph for understanding the SS and its place in the spectrum of Prusso-German history and Prussian soldierly values.
Himmler’s practical achievement in creating an elite guard as an extension of his goals was matched by his political achievement in gathering the power to do exactly as he wished with all those opposing his goals. The triangle, ‘Political Police – concentration camps – SS’, which he had established in Bavaria, he now established throughout the Reich.
‘In fulfilling my task I do basically what I can answer for to my conscience in my work for Führer and Volk and what conforms to a healthy person’s understanding. Whether others moaned about laws being broken in these months and years in which it was a matter of life or death for the German Volk was totally immaterial.’
In practice Himmler paid as little attention to the phrase ‘within the Reich Ministry of the Interior’ as he did to his nominal subordination to Göring in the affairs of the Gestapo and the concentration camps. As ‘Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police’ he acknowledged only one superior, Adolf Hitler.
As Police Chief his goals were practically limitless. He saw his task as preventing crime before it happened by shutting away habitual criminals, preserving the Volk from contamination by shutting away subversives who might corrupt them, picking up vagrants, the ‘work-shy’ and ‘anti-socials’ and putting them to useful work in his camps, and in addition supervising public morals. Abortion and homosexuality concerned him particularly;
Were they to pursue the priests like other German citizens, he said, he could guarantee 200 or more cases in the next three to four years. Trials were not lacking because they lacked cases but because they simply did not have enough officials and judges. But he hoped that in four years conclusive proof would be furnished that the Church leadership and priesthood were to an overwhelming extent an erotic homosexual male fraternity, ‘which on this basis has been terrorising people for 1800 years, claiming from them the greatest blood sacrifices, sadistically perverse in its manifestations’.
then there was the characterisation of the Church as a homosexual club seeking the degradation of women, and the suggestion that their Germanic forefathers had dealt simply with homosexuals by sinking them in bogs. With these glimpses into Himmler’s soul it cannot be doubted that the goals he was to pursue a few years later were direct expressions of this inner turmoil and were present, even if not precisely formulated, in 1937 – had been present at least since he had come under Hitler’s spell and been appointed Reichsführer-SS.
SS salaries were low, and to ensure loyalty had to be supplemented partly by ‘expenses’ from the special account ‘R’ accumulated from Freundeskreis donations, partly in the form of exclusive facilities, SS clubs
His total disregard of the state legal authorities by this time is demonstrated by the way he cut through all conventional forms of justice to define categories of people he wished to arrest.
Inside the camps the prisoners reflected his obsession with order and his compulsion to classify: they formed a living card index, displaying their category in coloured patches sewn on the left breast of their jacket and the right side of their trousers – red triangles for ‘politicals’, green for criminals, pink for homosexuals, black for the vagrants, the work-shy and the uncooperative who were known as ‘anti-socials’, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose beliefs prohibited them from bearing arms, yellow for Jews.
A keen young Nazi from Austria named Adolf Eichmann, who had applied for service in the SD to escape the crushing monotony of military training in SS-Standarte Deutschland at Dachau, found himself accepted and posted to the ‘Freemasons’ section at the Wilhelmstrasse Palace. At first he worked in a huge room stocked with filing cabinets, sorting and filing cards on freemasons worldwide.
After ‘Freemasons’ Eichmann was transferred to ‘Jews’ – SD Office II 112 – where he was given a book by Theodor Herzl advocating the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and told to abstract its arguments for the instruction of the SS in general and the SD in particular. From this beginning he became the department expert on Zionism and Jewish emigration. Like the ‘Freemasons’ the ‘Jews’ office was engaged in building up a card index of all prominent Jews in the Reich and abroad.
Just as the Army general staff planned the coming war of Blitzkrieg in all detail, so Heydrich and the intellectuals he had collected in the SD planned the political, economic, racial and class reorganisation necessary to subjugate the conquered populations.
If Hitler is regarded as the ego or will of the Third Reich, Heydrich and the SD can be likened to the nerve- and reasoning-centre, structuring the Führer’s basic methods, which never varied.
By 1935, like Hess, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop and other unofficial ambassadors to England, he was actively involved in promoting Anglo-German friendship.
‘I believe in God, too,’ Himmler said seriously. ‘I believe in miracles. I’m Party member number 2. We were seven men who had faith that this National Socialist ideology would win. Now we are the government. Isn’t that a miracle?’
Himmler applied all these views to his beloved SS. It appeared to him axiomatic that as the racially selected elite the SS must produce the finest sportsmen, and to encourage all-round fitness he made promotion dependent on the attainment of the sports ‘badges’ awarded by the German Sports Association
The traumas of his treatment on the parallel bars at the hands of Herr Haggenmüller at the Wilhelm Gymnasium must have approached very close to the surface of his mind as he lectured his people. Perhaps it is not surprising that he had to bolster his ego with suggestions that he had fought at the front and there learned to ‘booze and smoke’. Just as his features were far from the Nordic ideal, his body was not designed for sport. There are photographs and cine films of him in running shorts and vest, or a bare top revealing heavy breasts, thick middle, large backside, very short arms and
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One of Hitler’s fundamental arguments for conquering Lebensraum in the east was to acquire an agricultural base which would allow the Reich to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs and so able to withstand any future blockade by sea.
It was entirely in character that Hitler sought to meet the crisis by will power, advancing rather than retreating from the unalterable aims of the policy which had caused the crisis in the first place – namely rearmament for the conquest of Lebensraum. And since his arguments in the memorandum express ideological views identical to those in Mein Kampf and in his second book, and his speeches, it can be argued that the decision to increase the pace of rearmament, to put the economy on a controlled war footing and to take the first steps in decoupling Germany from the world market emanated from
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Von Blomberg, von Fritsch and von Neurath, however, did not believe that Great Britain and France would stand by idly and allow them to carry out the preliminary expansion of the Reich into Austria and Czechoslovakia. According to the accepted story it was their remarks at this meeting which showed Hitler how much they distrusted his reckless forward policy. If so, he was badly informed about the attitude of the Reaktion. In the light of his invariable method of dealing with men who were not prepared to submerge all critical faculties before his genius, the ‘Hossbach’ meeting is more likely to
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His chief fellow conspirators were once again Göring and Himmler. Göring had ambitions to take over from von Blomberg as War Minister; Himmler deployed the SD and SS, as in all previous ‘solutions’, as respectively the general staff and the unconditionally loyal guard of the Führer. Heydrich was once again in charge of the detailed planning, of both the external strike against Austria and the internal strike against the Army leadership. He appears to have been aided by extraordinary luck. Both von Blomberg and von Fritsch seem to have delivered themselves without resistance into his hands. But
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The reason for the instructions was to spread rumours in the Army High Command to undermine von Blomberg’s position before the actual dénouement. Keitel was the conduit to the officer corps; Göring was the agreed line to Hitler.
in November 1933 von Fritsch had indulged in a homosexual act with a professional male prostitute in a dark corner of the Berlin Wannsee railway station. The charge rested on the depositions of a professional blackmailer named Otto Schmidt, who had been caught two years after the incident during Himmler’s drive against homosexuals. It was a framed charge, resting on a similarity of names. The man Schmidt had seen at the Wannsee station was a retired officer with a monocle named von Frisch, but it was not difficult for the Gestapo to convince Schmidt that he should implicate General von
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it was too late. Hitler had taken over the Wehrmacht; Keitel and his OKW were loyal to him; von Fritsch was in disgrace on indefinite leave pending the findings of a Reich court of honour – convened eventually with Göring as president – and before Canaris could prove von Fritsch’s innocence and the false witness, Schmidt, could be made the scapegoat for the whole affair by being forced to admit he had lied, Hitler had taken over Austria. With this triumph on top of his previous record of success against the ‘Versailles powers’, he was unassailable. Von Fritsch could be satisfied that his
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Meanwhile Heydrich’s provocateurs joined members of the conservative opposition in inciting Oster and senior generals to stage a coup on their behalf. Had they done so Himmler would have had the evidence he needed to act against them as traitors.
The man appointed to succeed von Fritsch as Commander-in-Chief, von Brauchitsch, was little better able to stand up to Hitler. In any case the chain of command had been altered decisively against him and Beck. The Army was no longer master in its own house and no longer provided a unified centre of resistance to the Party and the SS.
German troops were met with joyous demonstrations as they marched in, and he and Wolff had no difficulty in joining Hitler before he made an emotional home-coming to his boyhood town, Linz. To be with his Führer at this momentous time was important to Himmler. Although an ‘old fighter’ from the ‘time of struggle’, he was not in Hitler’s intimate circle, and needed to bring himself to attention at every opportunity. Emotionally, he needed to drink at the fountainhead of power; politically, in the Byzantine atmosphere which Hitler created around himself, he needed to impress the leader with his
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The acquisition of more and more enemies was a natural product of Hitler’s success. In its turn it made the threat of the world conspiracy against Germany appear even more real, the National Socialist message more relevant, the need for indivisible unity behind the Führer more necessary.
It was indeed a ticklish point, not only in terms of the Volk. It could not escape notice that few in the top leadership conformed to the racial ideal in any way: Hitler, Hess, little Dr Goebbels and, of course, Himmler had dark hair.
Göring was prepared to increase the money supply and the national debt. Orthodox economists like Hjalmar Schacht, still head of the Reichsbank, predicted a period of desperate inflation and financial chaos.
Almost certainly there was a connection: Jews were, after all, considered to be the wire-pullers behind the international conspiracy against Germany, and Jews were immediately accessible within Germany as defenceless targets for vengeance. It is surely not coincidence that the first burning of a synagogue took place in Munich, spiritual headquarters of the regime, on 9 June, thus little more than a fortnight after the Czech rebuff; it was followed by the arrest of over 2000 Jews throughout the Reich, who were thrown into concentration camps.
seems clear that the pressure on Hitler to advance was created by these internal conditions as much as by his ego or his Weltanschauung. He needed a foreign success to preserve his aura and bind the people to him as the saviour of Germany as much as he needed Czechoslovakia for its economic and strategic position. For the same reasons he needed ideological enemies. It was an ever-tightening spiral that could lead only to increased internal repression and foreign adventures. And the tighter this spiral became the more he had to rely on Himmler.
The plan assumes significance when compared with the coup that was attempted eventually on 20 July 1944, but little otherwise can be taken at face value. Hitler’s and Himmler’s method in successive coups was always to draw their opponents into the open. No one will ever know who the double agents were in this deadly dangerous game nor the twists and turns of the plot. It is not inconceivable that there were those in ‘opposition’ circles who were inciting Hitler to a forward policy in order to draw him into a false move, not inconceivable that Himmler himself was keeping his options open as it
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The incredulous, the weak and the doubters were indeed converted. The generals’ conspiracy dissolved like snow in the sun of the Führer’s genius. Now it is difficult to assess if it really existed outside the imaginations of a few individuals like Oster and Beck and Gisevius.
The ‘action’ began the following evening after news of vom Rath’s death. In every city and town and most villages in the Reich, parties of SA, SS and Hitler Youth in plain clothes, already briefed on their targets, went on a rampage of arson and destruction of synagogues, Jewish shops, businesses and homes, rounding up Jews and humiliating, beating and in several cases killing them. Wolff knew nothing of the start of this, according to his account, nor did Heydrich, according to his widow’s account.
It was another manifestation of his contradictions that while he appeared to Goerdeler and others to be the real master of Germany he was so unsure of his position that on his return he continued to take every opportunity to bring himself to Hitler’s attention and to propose schemes which arose as much from his need to impress as from his fanaticism. Thus, as he and his rivals, Göring, Goebbels, von Ribbentrop and, recently, Martin Bormann circled around each other, their competing fantasies drove out what was left of reality about the Führer.
Himmler was also very anxious about his health at this time; he was suffering severely from the stomach cramps which had always afflicted him; at times they became so bad they almost reduced him to unconsciousness, and sometimes they lasted for days, leaving him utterly depleted.
It says much about the strains at the top of the Nazi hierarchy that Kersten found von Ribbentrop suffering severe headaches, giddiness, partial loss of vision and stomach pains. Hitler himself had suffered from sharp, cramping pains in his right upper abdomen since about the time of the Machtergreifung, and since 1936 had been taking capsules prescribed by his personal physician, Dr Morell, consisting of bacteria cultured from the excrement of a Bulgarian peasant.
‘the Führer is always right’ that was what he believed; it was self-evident from Hitler’s status as Germanic leader. Even if he could not understand certain decisions, or thought they were wrong, he yet believed they had a transcendent quality; it was only his own lack of vision that prevented him from seeing their essential rightness. ‘Simply an indication that Hitler might have a different opinion’, Kersten wrote, ‘sufficed to make Himmler hesitate and postpone a decision until he had been able to make sure of Hitler’s attitude.’[102] More surprising still, Himmler was in a state of fear
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